


Our Last Days of Silence

by Sangerin



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-03
Updated: 2007-08-03
Packaged: 2017-10-17 02:20:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sangerin/pseuds/Sangerin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So here he is, alone in an hotel room, staring at the phone that he is convinced is staring back at him accusingly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Last Days of Silence

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: for the whole shebang, right up to the end of season 7.

It's just sitting there, accusingly. Inanimate object notwithstanding, the telephone is watching him, here in this bland, characterless hotel room. He could have been in any number of towns or cities had he still been for the Russell campaign.

Only he's not working for the Russell campaign anymore. This time it's his campaign, his career. His life.

Elsie has given him an iPod and a docking station, and to break up the silence of the room and the dullness of CNN, he switches it on to something that's either Snow Patrol or Ryan Adams, only Will doesn't actually know which one is which. He never should have let Elsie take charge of his music collection. Bad idea. Bad.

He wonders, yet again, why he ever thought this was a good idea. To refuse a job with the DNC, and to instead campaign for Congress in Oregon. Oregon, of all places. On the other side of the country from… well, everything. Everything that mattered. An extra five hours' flight away from Europe, and nowhere near a decent deli. (Oh, Seattle thought it was all hip and with it, but the East Coast, now that was where it was really at. Not, of course the sort of thoughts one should allow to slip out during a campaign – it's never a good idea to disparage your potential voters.)

Thoughts like that are dangerous, but common in the cold light of a bare hotel room. Will has campaign staff to do all the things that he himself used to do for Russell - deal directly with the bureaucrats from the DNC; take the bossy calls from Josh Lyman, who hasn't changed, hasn't and never will realise that he has people to handle the small stuff now.

It has surprised Will, in the last few months, to realise that he misses Josh and his badgering. He's a reminder of old times; idiotically, a reminder of simpler times, when he was the follower instead of the supposed boss, and yet had more authority to direct the campaign. Josh is a reminder of the West Wing – of the brilliant people he worked with there: Leo and the President, Toby, Charlie, CJ… and Kate.

They've drifted apart, he and Kate. They've never said to each other that their relationship is over: it seems simply to have ceased. He has been busy, off in Oregon: Kate has been busy, adjusting to the needs of a new administration. And although Kate never really answered Will's election day question, he's always assumed that she voted for Vinick, which has created a far greater rift than he would have thought possible.

And so here he is, alone in an hotel room, staring at the phone that he is convinced is staring back at him accusingly, pointing out to him that he hasn't called Kate in more than a week. At the same time, of course, Kate hasn't called him. And it's only on these long, dull nights, with Elsie's musical offerings playing instead of CNN, when the loneliness really gets to him: the idea that maybe this will be his life, just him, all alone, until he dies. Surrounded by rumour and innuendo (as single men are these days), reliant on his sister and friends for love and care, lonely and grumpy and ornery, like his grandfather after Grandmere died. It's not a picture of the future he likes to think about, and yet it's one he can't clear from his mind.

Elsie is settled now, or as settled as he suspects she'll ever get, and even Will's mother has ceased to ask about grandchildren (although their family is big and confusing enough already, without adding additional generations to the mix).

But the unfinished business between himself and Kate haunts him. If he picks up the phone, what will he say? That it's over? That it's not? Will he ask her to fly out to Oregon on the weekend, to patch things up between them? Or will he gently (for he has been trained throughout his life to be a gentleman) suggest that Kate let him go – if she hasn't already?

That odd, old-fashioned part of him still believes that he is the one that has to make the running, and yet he still isn't sure what the running is. And still he looks at the phone, and imagines its accusatory stare.

He picks up the phone, finally. Dials the numbers. Prays that no-one picks up the other end.

'Harper.'

'Kate, how are you? It's Will.'

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> * Thanks to [](http://castaly.livejournal.com/profile)[**castaly**](http://castaly.livejournal.com/) for the beta.  
>  * Title is from Snow Patrol's "You Can Be Happy", therefore thanks to [](http://mab2701.livejournal.com/profile)[**mab2701**](http://mab2701.livejournal.com/) for all the Snow Patrol on my computer...


End file.
